Nancy Jo Sales on the Sex, Social Media, and Teenagers from Her Story “Friends Without Benefits”

Nancy Jo Sales’s September 30th piece, “Friends Without Benefits,” generated enormous response from readers both on VF.com and through several social-media channels that also appear in her article. Though Sales explored an online social climate that can be harsh and emotionally damaging, the rich discussion that followed neatly demonstrated one major benefit of instant communication. Readers noted that the particular situations related in the piece result not from one problem or event but from a confluence of social and technological factors. Here in a Q&A with Sales, we attempt to parse these distinct factors.

__VF Daily:__So what was the genesis of this piece?

Nancy Jo Sales: I was talking with my editor about some of the things that have been going on in the world of girls—in the news we’ve seen a rash of campus rapes, suicides from cyber-bullying, kids filming themselves doing horrible things to each other and putting it online. And we wanted to know if these were just isolated cases or indicative of a more widespread, hostile atmosphere. In other words, what’s going on in the lives of quote, unquote normal girls? And then when I started interviewing girls, all they wanted to talk about was social media—what was happening on social media, their relationship to it, and what it means in their lives.

Why did you pick New York and L.A.?

These are places where trends tend to arise and exist in a heightened state. I wish I could have interviewed girls all over the country, but you have to pick somewhere. And actually I don’t think it matters as much anymore where you talk to kids because with social media, there is no set physical place from where culture emerges anymore. It happens online, on phones. That’s where teen culture is now—in cyber world.

In the piece three distinct elements emerge that impact how some young people experience sexuality. One is social media, obviously; another is pornography; and the last is bullying. How are these different from what they were in the past? Let’s start with social media. I used AIM when I was in high school, circa 2004.

Social media is not the same in 2013 as it was in 2003—or even 2008 or 2011. You didn’t carry around AOL chat in your pocket or look at it when you were in class. With smart phones and apps, there are no boundaries. There’s no space or time limit on when you can chat with someone or discuss sex with someone, if you want to—and that’s something very new for kids. For me this piece isn’t about being shocked that teenagers are having sex or are interested in sex. I think I even say in the piece, “Kids have always been interested in sex, of course.” But each era has its own sexual mores, and that’s what this piece is about. Social media happens to be a huge part of that now—it’s where sex happens, or at least where it seems to begin for most kids. And what does that mean for them?

Many parents are from a generation that grew up with no social media at all and therefore may not be particularly attuned to the role it plays in their children’s lives. Is there a knowledge gap at play here?

Definitely. A lot of parents simply don’t know what’s going on, and I think they need to know. I’m not a parenting expert by any means, but I’ve been interviewing and writing about kids for almost 20 years. I try and just let them tell their own stories. I often find what they have to say about themselves is more revelatory than what adults have to say about them. But I’m glad the piece has been getting comments and tweets from people who are* *experts in the field of kids, and I’m glad that a lot of them have been saying that the piece resonates with them and that parents should read it. A parenting writer, Michael Y. Simon [author of The Approximate Parent: Discovering the Strategies That Work with Your Teenager] commented that (and I’m reading from my screen): “I want parents to read this article because it is impossible to understand what it means to be a teenager in America without understanding the kinds of situations described in the article not as bizarre or unique, but as increasingly commonplace ways of enacting what it ‘means’ to be sexual in the American sexual culture of teens.”

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And the technologies we carry with us are a factor. Kids—not to mention the rest of us—are experiencing culture online. I think a lot of people have asked you what’s to be done, but it doesn’t seem that anyone is going to disconnect anytime soon.

I don’t really think it’s the devices themselves or technology itself that are the problem here. It’s the values and trends in our culture that are the problem, that are being expressed on these devices and through this technology.

Values such as?

For me, more than social media, this piece is about our society’s attitudes towards women and girls—attitudes that girls have to deal with daily, in their interactions with boys, and in their introduction to sex. When and how did some of these attitudes originate? I think you have to look at the mainstreaming of pornography through its availability on the Internet in the last 20-something years. The mainstreaming of porn isn’t new. Sixteen years ago I did a story called “Sex and the High School Girl” for New Yorkmagazine in which boys talked to me about watching porn. Since then, more and more kids are watching porn, porn that tends to be more hardcore, violent, and fetishistic. I don’t have any statistics on kids having more sex in this new piece, because that isn’t my point here. However I do have statistics on kids watching porn, and I think those are important to look at and to ask ourselves, What does this do to teenagers, and to children? How does it affect boys’ attitudes toward girls? How does it affect girls’ self-esteem and feeling of well-being? And how is this affecting the way that children and teenagers are communicating on these new technologies?

How does bullying come into play in all this? “Jenna,” one of the girls that you write about, was bullied both online and at school, as were many of the other girls in your piece.

If I was shocked by anything in these interviews, it was by how many of these girls had experienced some form of cyber-bullying. Almost every single one. And over about three months I talked to scores of girls. Almost all of them had been cyber-bullied or knew someone who had. And some of these cases had extreme outcomes, such as the case of “Amanda,” the “Scene Girl” in the piece who tried to kill herself. A lot has been written about cyber-bullying; we know it’s a huge problem in our culture. We know that when people have the anonymity of being behind a screen, they are apt to say things they wouldn’t necessarily say to someone’s face. But what I think we need to also start asking ourselves is why is there all this meanness? I don’t think it can simply be attributed to anonymity and technology and these devices. When did our culture get so mean, and how? And how is this meanness towards girls and between girls we are seeing also being influenced by sexism and pornography?

Jenna’s story was so powerful to me because there is no reason for Jenna to be anything but happy and carefree. She’s a beautiful young woman, doing incredibly well, already working professionally in her chosen field. And yet Jenna was very unhappy. At 19, she’s already been through a lot: she has been cyber-bullied; she was dumped online; all this craziness had happened to her. And so Jenna develops this callous around her heart. You see in her story how trying to establish relationships in cyberspace and then being rejected and even harassed and bullied online can have a serious impact on some girls’ ability to form intimate relationships. For Jenna it destroyed a sense of trust. By the time she’s a freshman in college, Jenna’s like: “I don’t want to have a relationship. I just want to, you know, fuck and go home.” That’s not really what she wants, but she’s protecting herself.

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In the piece I also mention how Hanna Rosin’s *The End of Men *and a recent New York Times article are telling us something different, that the reason why some girls today become like this is because they just want to focus on their careers, and they don’t really want to have relationships. I question that. According to Donna Freitas, a woman I interview in the piece who did a study of hundreds of kids on seven college campuses, this theory is actually rather off base. When young women are saying, “I don’t want to have a relationship—I just want to have sex,” it’s possible it’s not because they’re some kind of ambitious Amazon, but because they’ve been hurt by a whole lot of stuff that happened in high school.

I’m curious about the things you found that you chose not to report on, for instance, how boys fit into the picture.

We were always doing a piece on girls. I do quote a couple of boys in the piece, but only to give you some echo of what I have been hearing from boys since I did “Sex and the High School Girl” in 1997—really a lot of degrading talk from boys about girls, a lot of macho posturing. Like the boy on the bus in this new piece who says, “Gotta reel the bitches in, gotta reel the bitches in.” There’s a whole other piece to be done on boys and why they think and talk this way; but again, I think you could start by looking at pornography and some of the bigger trends in our culture involving women and sexual attitudes.

But aren’t there also a lot of girls who post provocative pictures of themselves online that might feed into a perception of objectification?

Absolutely. The girls I interviewed actually talk a lot about that. Even if they’re not doing it themselves, it’s in their faces: their friends posting really provocative pictures of themselves on Facebook and Instagram, sending nude pictures on Snapchat. There have actually been Internet memes about the “leg shot” phenomenon.

Um, what’s a “leg shot”?

It’s a picture that typically a girl posts of her legs coming out of short shorts or bikinis. Why are they doing this? Is this sexual liberation? Is it good for them? There’s a whole lot of concern now about what’s known as hypersexualization. Girls are aware of it—they know the issues and sometimes even know the word—and yet some of them still can’t resist objectifying themselves, as they even talk about in the piece. To be popular, which is what high school is all about, you have to get “likes” on your social-media pics.

Yes, it seems there is a lot of quantifying going on.

As the girl I call “Greta” says in the piece, “more provocative equals more likes.” And yet a lot of them told me how presenting themselves in this way is making them anxious and depressed—and that’s what high-school counselors are seeing, too. I don’t know what the answer is. All a piece like this can do is reveal a particular reality and get a conversation started. In a best-case scenario, that’s what journalism does—gets us talking about stuff that matters.